New Mouse
 

To any out there not down with a "non-mac" mouse, I highly recommend chaging your tune. After years and years of the single button factory issued mouse, I finally took the plunge and dropped $12 bucks(with free shipping!! :D) on ebay for a Logitech optical scroll-wheel mouse.

Aside from the scroll wheel, the biggest plus for me is that I programmed the right button to be the Apple key (what's the name for that?) so that when I want to click on a link and open it in another tab, I right and left click and viola!, new tab, without ever touching the keyboard. Granted, Apple should have made that a preference, 'all links open in new tab', alas, not so.

Now if I can only learn the freedom of the opitcal mouse. My old pad was so small, I unconciously picked up my mouse and centered it so often, now I find myself picking up the optical mouse when I don't need to.

Ah, conditioning!!

Hmmm, not a help request...

How about "OS Xperiences?"

Moving...

The "apple key" is known as the Command key.

Been using a 4-button track ball (Kensington) for the last 5 years, buttons currently assigned as follows for Safari:

Lower left: regular-click
Lower right: control-click
Upper left: command-click (to open link in new tab)
Upper right: double-click

Trackball?? NoooooOOoooo! I NEVER could get used to those things!

rusto, yellow,

Mouse? Trackball? No way! I use a graphics tablet myself. I"ve got the pen button programmed for the option key for touchup work in Photoshop and for opening web links in a new page. Graphics tablets rawk, dudes. :-)

A bit more seriously, it is amazing how personal, and passionate, people's choices about pointing devices are. What works for one person, the next person may hate, and vice versa. I'm very careful not to give a definitive answer when somebody asks me, "What's the best pointing device?"

miklb, you may want to try programming control-click into that right button, then you can use it by itself to open contextual menus.

Call it laziness or whatever but I've been Macing since 1990 and until about 2003 I was still using a single button mouse. Then I was 'enlightened'. Now I'll never go back!

I find the simple Microsoft optical scroll-wheel mouse to be an excellent replacement for the Mac mouse. The Apple mouse is built nice with the thick plastic and all, but it will not click if the cord touches the top of the body and it is hard to click in the first place, which irritates my RIS.

Optical mice were a great replacement for ball mice because the gunk that the ball picked up eventually trashed the mouse. Optical mice are obviously better.

But not only did I have Schneb's problems with the Apple mouse, I realised that the cord coming out of the back of the mouse was too flexible and eventually the insulation went. As the cable shorted out, it brought down my whole system.

So now I've abandoned wired mice and gone wireless with my Kensington pro one. I like.

But I might complain in time on this thread about power consumption. :)

Does the Kensington Pro need a driver?

I've read some stories here where difficulties result because the mouse is not operational until the computer fully boots. I don't recall the difficulties, but choosing a boot disk when starting up with the option key held down comes to mind. I might be in the market for a mouse soon...the wire as it comes out of the mouse bumps into books, etc. occasionally.

Yes and no. A full driver download gives access to button settings etc which can't be set by the Apple driver. But I have been able to use it at startup to select a system drive as described in your post. I assume that it's happy providing basic functions with the default driver.

I'm using 10.3.3, Kensington PocketMousePro Wireless. The mouse driver has to be downloaded. It's called, er, ... MouseWorks!

Thank you bramley. That's what I needed to know; that is reliable. I did some further searching for those old threads I referred to and found that it was the non-Apple keyboards to be wary of. Consider thread 1, thread 2, and thread 3 . The following thread speaks well of a Logitech mouse, so it really seems to be a keyboard thing.

Will avoid non-Apple keyboards.

Couple of further points about the mouse though. It does use large amounts of batteries. There does not appear to be a power down feature. I leave my Mac on 24/7 and am always forgetting to remove batteries from my mouse. After about 10 days, it's new battery time. I've switched to using rechargables in it. You might want to consider a fully rechargable version shown here http://www.kensington.com/html/3968.html for the same price.

Also plan on putting the antenna in the keyboard USB hub because its status lights and "reboot" button (after battery change) are easy to see and use.

mclbruce,

In addtion to the trackball (which handles all of my "conventional' mousing), I do have an Intuos2 6x8 for Photoshopping. Can't live without it.

:)

maybe i'm just too sensitive, but i have found the wireless (RF) mice to have an intollerable amount of lag. and, i dont imagine the BT mice are much better.

my first try was in '94 with a logitech offering. yuk. about 1/4 second lag on cursor movement.

lately--within the past 5 years--i've tried a newer logitech and a MS intellimouse explorer wireless (i had high hopes for the MS because the wired version of that mouse is my current fav). altho the response times are getting better, i still find the lag so bad i cannot concentrate on my work but instead on following the mouse cursor around.

am i the only one? are there better alternatives now?

Actually, it's the "open Apple key" (as opposed to the closed Apple key), if you remember it from the Apple IIc and IIe (maybe earlier?) days.

I do believe that the official name is now the command key, just poking fun from an old memory. ;)

i've never used any wireless other than the one I'm using now. I don't have an issue with it. I can understand your point though. I do a fair bit of CAD work so I'd soon get pretty frustrated if the response was poor.

But I don't have this complaint. The response seems good. The downloaded driver gives me more options with regard to mouse movement than the Apple sys pref does. I had a fiddle with the controls and could get behaviour I wasn't happy with but not lag.

I'm mostly guessing here, but I reckon that an optical wireless mouse might respond better than ball wireless. Did you test only ball mice before?

BTW, I'm using RF.

the original logitech mouse was ancient...so it was a ball mouse. the other two are more recent....a logitech one (cant remember the model) and the M$intellimouse explorer, both were IR sensor mice. i think the M$ model looked like the one still shipping, tho i'm sure it was an older rev.

i used it for 1/2 a day before i boxed it back up. that was about 18 months ago.

i'm willing to give it another try if you think the tech may have improved. what model are you using?

It's a Kensington one. Not sure that it's IR. Very bright red light certainly :) I'm a little surprised at the high price in the US - well, there was a promo on over here. The model was the one shown here http://www.kensington.com/html/1743.html I made a couple of comments further back up this thread that you might want to read first. Also you might want to see the rechargable mice.

PS You started helping Holly here http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=2307 Well, I've tried but I'm clearly in a very different timezone and it'll be Xmas before we're done, not to mention I know little iPhoto 1.0! Would you ....?

I was happy with one button on a Mac..
 

Until I got my new Dual 450 G4 in summer of 2000. I grabbed a Logitech 'Wheel Mouse', and used the drivers under 9 to set the scroll wheel 'click' action to a double-click. (I don't use any drivers under X with any mouse, I like the 'middle-click' to open tabs in Safari feature)

I have bought 2 more since then, all worked perfectly until their respective death. :o
The last of the three kept its life and is now in service with Bob the 7500 thanks to a PCI USB card.

I'm now using a MacAlly DotMouse, pretty sweet tracking, I seem :rolleyes: to be more accurate in RTCW online with it than the Logitech.
It's got nice response.

Check it out here.

http://www.macally.com/new/new_dotmouse.html

action shots:

http://www.rbmods.com/Bilder/Article...mouse/pic3.jpg
http://www.rbmods.com/Bilder/Article...mouse/pic5.jpg

my two cents...
 

As another person wrote before, MS mice are the best. They make a great "apple" one that can be found in Apple Stores. White, two-button, scroll, optical.

And setting the third mouse button (clicking the scroll wheel) to Expose-All Applications is really the way to go.

My Logitech MX500 mouse is the best mouse I've ever used. It's got a very nice shape and plenty of buttons that I use for Expose, cmd-m, pgup, pgdn. The only problem is the crappy OS X support in Logitech's drivers. :mad: Apple's mouse acceleration curve in OS X is really horrible too... I'm always wishing for XP-like smooth, natural mouse movement.

Logitech's new bluetooth MX900 mouse is great (I'm using it right now on my powerbook), the only problem is that it doesn't have drivers for Mac as of yet, so I can't customize any of the buttons. Left-click, right-click, and scroll wheel work just fine for their usual functions. It's really too bad that Apple won't give up on their one button design. They really have the best mice out there of any I've seen.